In 1990 Brawne retired from his position as Professor of Architecture at the University of Bath, held since 1978. Before that, from 1964, he taught architecture at the University of Cambridge. His teaching was combined with work as an active practitioner. When, as in this book, an author of such maturity and experience reflects on the nature of architectural design, one's expectations are immediately aroused. To describe my impression of Brawne's book, let me begin with some remarks on the form; after that I will summarize what I see as his main train of thought, commenting on selected aspects of the author's argument. On this background it should become clear why, on the whole, I find this book worth recommending, although in significant ways it did not come up to my expectations. I would classify the main subject of the book as 'theory or philosophy of architectural design'. Despite the fact that a substantial body of scientific literature on this topic exists, as exemplified by the work of Akin (1986), and despite the fact that the quest for a scientific basis for architecture is a major theme of the book, the style of writing, on some points, is markedly different from that of (other) scientific monographs on comparable topics. Presumably, Brawne has his reasons for deviating from the conventions (perhaps aesthetic ones), but making life easier for the reader is obviously not among them. To take a trivial but illustrative example, references to the literature (of which a comprehensive but generally rather dated collection is listed) are sometimes indicated in the text as a title of a book or article, but most of them must be looked up in a table of "Notes", near the end of the book. It contains entries like